Naomi

Naomi died last Tuesday. She had been born in occupied Holland. When her parents were about to be detained, first just in Westerbork, she was left with her paternal grandparents. Later, as the train deporting them was leaving, her grandfather, cantor of the main synagogue of Groningen, handed her out of the train window to a Christian Dutch woman who had come along; and who arranged for Naomi's first temporary home in hiding. She was Naneke now.

I first met her when, in the summer of 1945, I came from Capua, in Italy, where my (British Army) unit was stationed at the time, to see my relatives who had survived the genocide. I brought a heavy kit bag full of canned food which my brother had "organized" from the company kitchen. The Netherlands suffered more and longer from severe food shortage than adjacent Belgium, or France, and it was even worse for the few who returned alive from the camps, most of whom found others now living where they had been.

In spite of an accepting, or tolerant, attitude toward Jews by most Dutch people, a smaller percentage survived than in most (any?) other occupied countries. The Jewish community organizations had kept thorough records and were now made to supply the Nazis with lists for deportation before they could know at first that it would be for industrialized murder {added May 4 : I just saw that Lucy Davidowicz in her The War against the Jews wrote that the Nazis created a Joodsche Raad (Jewish Council) to which all Jewish organizations were subordinated and which in turn was under the Zentralstelle fuer Juedische Auswanderung of the SS officer in charge of the deportations; and that all Jews had to register. She is a serious historian, so to the extent that this differs rather than just provide more detail than the information I had, it ought to carry more weight}. The family of my aunt Leah, my mother's closest sister born almost exactly a year earlier, had just arrived without visa from Cologne after experiencing the Kristallnacht there. So they were among the earliest on the lists. That may have been the strange reason why all but my aunt survived; while, e.g., Anne Frank, who went to the same (Montessori) school in Amsterdam as my youngest cousin Ruth Ellen, but who had arrived years earlier from Frankfurt, had only her father survive.

I found Ruth Ellen along with my uncle Albert (who had been detained in Westerbork even before the war) in a huge hall (a gym?). It had been divided by makeshift drapes into "private" units for families of DPs (displaced persons, probably not all from death camps). My two older cousins were away (with soldiers of the Jewish Brigade who later became their husbands), but there was a woman, Rosi, who had lost all her family except her little daughter; whom she had just found and recovered a couple of weeks earlier. Naneke, the only name she knew, seemed completely disoriented in those strange surroundings away from "her family". But I finally got her to smile; apparently largely by having picked up the pail filled with water (their substitute for a water tap) and swinging it around overhead without the water having flown out; a cheap magic trick which she remembered the rest of her life.

When my uncle asked what I thought of the possibility that he would marry Rosi, I first said that he doesn't need family approval; but when he wanted my opinion anyway, I thought she seemed like a fine woman (but that I wouldn't call her Tante [aunt]; she was much younger than my aunt Leah). So Naomi became an extra cousin, part compensation for others lost.

(ctd May 1)
When I left for Italy, it was understood that they would all come to Palestine; as they did, in various ways, legally and otherwise. Even though I was no longer a Zionist and refused to take orders from the Haganah, which tried to have them obeyed in the Palestinian units, I did participate in their activity for illegal immigration of survivors (already before the Holland trip). After release from the army in 1946, I (and my brother) next saw our two younger (original) cousins across the fence of the British detention camp for illegal immigrants at Atlit, south of Haifa; but Naneke turned Naomi only after having returned from study in Nottingham in 1948 to serve in the Israeli army. She must have been 5 years oold by then; but later, she couldn't differentiate between those two encounters. She remembered being really scared of my rifle and thought that was at the same time as the water magic, but I didn't have a rifle along in Amsterdam.

My uncle, who had been anti-Zionist in Cologne, later returned with Rosi and Naomi to Amsterdam; where I saw them about once in a decade when I came to Europe from the US. Naomi had married but got divorced after the kids had grown up: daughter Tamar, now mother herself and son Gideon , who isn't; but his Masha has been expecting, still managing to provide some more nakhes for Naomi. She now shared a house with Martin, evidently a great friend with three married sons, and both generations of both families had become friends and provided support after she was stricken with leukemia. She still sounded upbeat when I phoned a week before the end. I was taking photos of flowers now shooting up all over Vancouver (or at least where I live) to send to her; just before getting the news.

We had met more often after the harassment I was subjected to following my solar sin against the ruling dirty energy interests made it advisable for me to stay away from the US as much as feasible. After 1988, I began to spend half a year in Vancouver and most of the rest in Europe, mainly the Netherlands; first in Delft, later in Den Haag (The Hague). Naomi had egun learning to sculpture at the Academy there and she tried to be helpful, e.g. in finding an apartment.She became so accomplished a sculptor in a short time that I couldn't tell the difference in artistic merit between her work and that of the Rodin types (though I sure ain't no expert). But then in the short time she had left, she gained real recognition, including commissions for public sculptures; for the unveiling of at least one of which the mayor of Amsterdam came.

Gideon phoned on April 18 leaving a message that his mother had died the day before. It was on April 18, 1943 that the SS and their Quisling type collaborators had been driven out of the Warsaw ghetto by the Jewish Fighting Organization when they came to collect more people for the Umschlagplatz for transport to the gas chambers. That started the weeks long uprising that showed that the human spirit cannot be broken no matter the depth of degradation imposed. A proper occasion for marking Resistance Day, not a good day for "Holocaust Remembrance" day. Naomi's grandpa Elburg's action as the train was leaving was an act of resistance not inferior to that of those who carried weapons. And it turned into a victory. The Nazis wanted to kill Naomi. Little babies had no chance to survive those camps, and by his daring action, he prevented them from achieving that goal. So it's also a good occasion to remember a hero like that. And the people who hid her.